Documents / Hearing transcript
This is the printed record of a July 29, 1968 symposium on unidentified flying objects held by the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives, chaired by Rep. J. Edward Roush. The committee heard statements from six scientists: J. Allen Hynek, James E. McDonald, Carl Sagan, Robert L. Hall, James A. Harder and Robert M. L. Baker. It also printed papers from Donald Menzel, Stanton Friedman, Frank Salisbury and others. Hynek argued that puzzling UFO reports from competent witnesses deserve serious scientific study.
“Nevers”43 pages
86 in the astronaut training program in Houston. In addition to well over a hundred scientific papers, and several articles written for the Encyclopedias Britannica and Americana, Dr. Sagan is co-author of "The Atmospheres of Mars and Venus" (1961), "Planets" (1966), and "Intelligent Life in the Universe." ( 1966). STATEMENT OF DR. CARL SAGAN, DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N.Y. Dr. SAGAN. Thank you very much, Congressman Roush. As I understand what the committee would like from me, is a dis- cussion of the likelihood of intelligent extraterrestrial life, and sincethis estimate is to be made in this symposium, clearly it is the hypo- thesis that unidentified objects are of extraterrestrial origin which the committee must have in mind. I'm delighted to tell about contemporary scientific thinking along these lines, but let me begin by saying that I do not think the evidence is at all persuasive, that UFO's are of intelligent extraterrestrial origin nor do I think the evidence is convincing that no UFO's are of intelligent extraterrestrial origin. I think as each of the preceding speakers has mentioned, but per- haps not sufficiently emphasized, that the question is very much an open one, and it is certainly too soon to harden attitudes and make any permanent contentions on the subject. I find that the discussion, like elsewhere, is best evaluated if we con- sider the question of life on earth. I suppose that if you had all your prejudices removed and were concerned with the question of whether the earth was populated by life of any sort, how would you go about finding out? If, for example, we were on some other planet, let's say Mars, and looking at the Earth, what would we see? Fortunately we now have meteorolgical satellite photographs of the earth at various resolu-tions, so we can answer the question. The first large slide. This is a photograph of the earth. That is the full earth, which you are looking at which is primarily cloud cover. This is the Pacific Ocean. You can see southern California in the upper right, and, as ad- vertised by the local chamber of commerce, you can see it is cloud free. [Laughter.] Dr. SAGAN. Now, it is clear that very little information about the earth, much less possibility of life on it, is obtained by a picture at this resolution. The next large slide is a TIROS photograph of the earth at about 1 -mile resolution, that is, things smaller than a mile cannot be seen, and very prolonged scrutiny of the entire eastern seaboard of the United States shows no sign of life, intelligent, or otherwise. We have looked at several thousand photographs of the earth, andyou may be interested to see that there is no sign of life, not only in New York or Washington,but also in Peking, Moscow,London, Paris, and so on. The reason is that human beings have transformed the earth at this kind of scale very little, and therefore the artifacts of human intelli- gence are just not detectable photographically in the daytime with this sort of resolution. The next slide shows one of the few successful finds of intelligentlife on earth that we made down toward the lower left you can see
Hearing transcript, from the govinfo collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 256 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.